I told an intelligent, well-educated friend about Less Wrong, so she googled, and got “Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking.” and gave up immediately because she’d never heard of the biases.
Note that that’s not the first sentence on the homepage. The first sentence on the homepage is
In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding.
(This gives some context by explaining what a cognitive bias is.)
Maybe if we increased the amount of whitespace preceding these paragraphs, people wouldn’t skip the first sentence?
BTW, I think it makes sense to decide whether to implement concrete changes with polls:
Should we increase the amount of whitespace preceding the introductory paragraphs on the homepage?
Welcome to Less Wrong lesswrong.com/ ▾ Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity …
Google quotes that sentence out of context, so its wording is especially important.
Note that that’s not the first sentence on the homepage. The first sentence on the homepage is
(This gives some context by explaining what a cognitive bias is.)
Maybe if we increased the amount of whitespace preceding these paragraphs, people wouldn’t skip the first sentence?
BTW, I think it makes sense to decide whether to implement concrete changes with polls:
Should we increase the amount of whitespace preceding the introductory paragraphs on the homepage?
[pollid:984]
I’m not sure if reformatting the home page would have made any difference for Nancy’s friend. Was she on the home page, or the Google search page for “less wrong”?
Google quotes that sentence out of context, so its wording is especially important.